We are grateful to the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle for compiling these film notes
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TALK TO
HER
(Hable con ella)
Written and directed by Pedro Almodovar
In present-day Madrid, two men attend the same moderm dance performance. One observes the other weeping. This is Marco (Dario Grandinetti) a travel writer and journalist, involved in a love affair with female bullfighter Lydia (Rosario Flores). The other man, the gentle, almost effeminate Benigno (Javier Camara), has spent most of his life caring for his mother. Following her death, he has put his caring skills to work by becoming a nurse, but he too is involved with a woman who has changed his life. He first fell in love with Alicia (Leonor Watling), a young dancer, when he saw her from his apartment window. With no social skills in wooing, his unrequited passion grew worryingly close to obsession until an accident put Alicia into a long-term coma. Now Benigno devotes his life to caring for her at the hospital, spending his spare time following what he knows are her tastes so that he can describe them afterwards to her unresponsive ears. Chance brings the loves of Marco and Benigno together, and sees them both trying to fulfil the need to talk to the objects of their desire in ways that may break through the silence.
Hable con ella was three
years in the making, and although it opened to a fanfare of publicity and on
an unprecedented 276 screens in its native Spain, it didn't do the usual round
of film festivals. Writer/director Pedro Almodovar claims that he wished to
avoid the punishing round of publicity tours, and so chose to screen the film
direct to his Spanish audience. Critics suggest that his hesitancy could have
been fuelled by doubt - his 1999 movie All About My Mother was such an
unprecedented success, winning both Best Director at Cannes and the Oscar for
best foreign language film, that he wished to avoid an anticlimax with his latest
offering. Talk To Her grossed almost $1 million in its opening weekend, but
among the plaudits a few voices could be heard asking if we hadn't seen all
this before.
Almodovar would seem to be the victim of his own success. A prominent Spanish
celebrity who came up the hard way, on small scale, self-financed projects,
his work now generates clouds of expectation and his private life is no longer
his own. His films must bear the auteur's distinctive trademarks, but each one
must strike a familiar audience as entirely fresh. Now added to this situation
would seem to be the paradox of an individualistic, non-mainstream director
who no longer cares to take his product through that routine of international
festivals which is the natural home for just such movies. Has he sold out to
become a crowd-pleaser? Has the crowd (in Spain at least) learned to take pleasure
in art-house movies, just so long as they come with the panoply of promotion
usually accorded a Hollywood blockbuster? Are the goalposts moving? Writing
in SIGHT AND SOUND, Paul Julian Smith explores the themes of Talk To Her in
the context of Almodovar's (possible) change of direction:
''Previous Almodovar narratives stayed on the side of the woman. (Indeed it
was in 1988's Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown that Carmen Maura,
pursuing an ever-fugitive male lover, remarked that male psychology was more
mysterious than motor mechanics.) But Hable con ella, apparently so straight
in its premise of twin heterosexual couples, does continue Almodovar's oblique
investigation of queer sexualities. One of the most telling scenes shows Flores
being buckled into her bullfighting garb. The camera lingers longingly on the
beautiful fabric that confines her breasts and thighs. The significance of the
moment for Spanish audiences is heightened by the fact that in the real-life
corrida, high-profile women bullfighters have recently challenged the sport's
machismo. What is more, Rosario Flores, a distinguished singer in her own right,
is the daughter of Lola Flores, the most extravagantly feminine flamenco star
of an earlier era. The apparently placid Benigno, Almodovar's main man, is also
sexually ambiguous. Initially the character is set up as a stereotypical queen.
Mother-obsessed, he has trained in make-up and hair styling, all the better
to care for his comatose female friend. Apparently a virgin, he confesses to
Alicia's father, a psychoanalyst, that he prefers male company. And his initiation
of intimacy with the mourning Marco seems curiously seductive. Later plot twists,
however, confirm this is not the case: Benigno will belie his name.
Appropriately, given the clinical setting, much of Hable con ella is soft-spoken,
even delicate in tone, especially the conversations between the two lovers of
absent women. Marco and Benigno, the odd couple, bond over a common melancholia.
Almodovar has written that he is aiming for Rossellini and Antonioni here: intensity
of emotion combined with transparency of style. Perhaps his most daring innovation
(and one he knows will test his audience's patience) is the shift into what
can only be called a full-blown arthouse style.... As its press book claims,
Hable con ella integrates small-scale intimacy with outrageous spectacle in
a newly mature manner. The frank emotion of much of the film, unashamed but
never self-indulgent, comes with this new, male territory. While All
About My Mother's women were, according to Almodovar, all 'actresses'
playing themselves in life as on stage, Hable con ella's men are 'narrators
of themselves' telling their stories to those who can (and cannot) hear them.
Explaining his preference for heroines, Almodovar once claimed that 'women weep
better'. Now he presents us with Marco, who is moved to tears from the very
first scene. The public's patience will be sorely tried by this opening sequence.
A curtain rises, gold and pink, on a disturbing piece by that uncompromising
mistress of modern dance Pina Bausch in which two middle-aged women, hair streaming
and eyes closed, blunder about a stage crammed with chairs and tables. (The
same curtain featured at the end of All About My Mother). First-night
audiences in Madrid were initially unaware that the film had started, and it
is only when Almodovar finally cuts to moist reaction shots of Marco and Benigno
that the action proper begins. This principal narration, itself made up of the
four main characters' stories which flash forwards and backwards in time, will
be broken by 'independent units' linked symbolically but not literally to the
main action. These (the silent movie, the musical interludes) serve, in Almodovar's
words as a 'slap in the face' for the audience who are torn away from one promising
plot line only to be confronted with another.
....Indeed, more than any recent film of his, Hable con ella exploits the heat
(Spanish 'calor') of colour. Associated with the passionate Lydia is a heightened
vision of Andalucia (actually shot in the province of Cordoba) with its rich
red earth and porcelain-white chapels. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe,
fresh from his triumph with Alejandro Amenabar's The Others, devises smoothly-flowing
camera movements, a world away from the trendily nervous tremblings of, say,
Amores Perros. Composer Alberto Iglesias, recently awarded a Goya (Spanish
Oscar) for his work on Julio Medem's Sex and Lucia, contributes a typically
nuanced, classically influenced soundtrack. The supporting cast boasts Geraldine
Chaplin as Alicia's tense but tender dance teacher - a clear sign to Spanish
audiences that Almodovar is aiming for the outer reaches of the art movie which
Chaplin inhabited some 30 years ago with such films as Carlos Saura's Cria cuervos.''
Paul Julian Smith, SIGHT AND SOUND
Pedro Almodovar may have
arrived in Madrid as a film-hungry teenager in 1968, but the approved route
to directorship via filmmaking schools was both beyond his financial means and
under the oppressive control of Franco. So, while working for Madrid's national
telephone company in the 1970s, he became a member of the city's pop subculture,
acting in avant-garde theatre groups, performing in drag in a punk band, and
making 8mm films of the kind Franco would scarcely have appreciated.
This underground aesthetic is clearly apparent in his first features, Pepi,
Luci, Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) and Labyrinth of Passions
(1981) which rapidly became cult hits. He gained more serious critical attention
with Dark Habits (1984) and went on to establish his distinctive narrative
style with What Have I Done To deserve this? (1985), Matador (1986)
and Law of Desire (1987). In 1988 his comedy Women on the Verge of
a Nervous Breakdown became a worldwide hit and was nominated for a Best
Foreign Film Oscar. He has followed it with Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990),
High Heels (1991), Kika (1993), The Flower of My Secret (1995)
and Live Flesh (1997). In 1999, All About My Mother won the Oscar
for Best Foreign Film, bringing his international recognition to new heights.
''Talk To Her is
the work of a skilled, intelligent filmmaker at the height of his powers. The
kitsch eccentricities and camp merriment of his earlier films are largely absent,
but unlike, say, Woody Allen, who can't escape the huge shadow cast by his past,
Almodovar just continues to grow in stature. Touching, melancholic and deeply
haunting.' Matt Mueller, TOTAL FILM
'If men were the structuring absence of All About my Mother, Pedro Almodovar's
last film, male friendship and desire are the very subject matter of Talk
To Her. However, one of the beauties of Almodovar's filmmaking is that what
feels simple and direct is often complex and resonant. Almodovar accords Everyman
status to his two leads Benigno and Marco: we easily understand who they are
and what they represent, and we recognise their wants. Javier Camara's Benigno
is a thirtyish virgin, an expert hairdresser, a skilled beautician and a trained
nurse, with the chubby huggability of a teddy bear and the open face of a particularly
trusting child. He is his mama's daughter just as Lydia, Marco's bullfighting
girlfriend, is very much her father's son. Dario Grandinetti's Marco is manly
in body but emotionally, with his easy tears, he is what we expect of a sensitive
little girl: equally prolix writing or weeping, he is the structural opposite
of the dancer Alicia, who lies in a coma and can give expression to neither
her art nor her feelings. This is a film in which verbosity encases an underlying
and fundamental muteness: only with the two women in a coma can the men talk
freely to them and to each other.'' Jose Arroyo, SIGHT AND SOUND
''A lovely and well-rounded film from an auteur director who maintains a freshness
and originality within his trademark style.''
Jennifer Green, Screen International. ''Sensuality, spirituality and sheer joy
in storytelling.'' TIME OUT
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We are grateful to the Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle for compiling these film notes
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